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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

I got introduced to a distributed version control system called "Git". Git is not like traditional version control systems like SVN or CVS, but which provides much more features a developer can imagine/ would need for those painful code merges.

I had gone through this wonderful presentation by Bart Trojanowski and you can find them here. Bart provides brief intro on how Git works and how the version is tracked in Git ("the close to perfect" SCM). Then he goes on explaining about major features a developer would need to start using Git.

This presentation have been highly helpful for me to get grasp of Git. I want to thank Bart for this wonderful presentation and Ian Ward for making this screen-casts available online.

I installed Git on my PC machine using Cygwin. The stack is pretty awesome and neat. I would recommend the same for any PC users. When installing Git packages for cygwin, make sure you also pull in GUI tools ( gitk and git gui). If you are a tortoiseSVN or tortoiseCVS user, these tools would of great help.

Git uses local repository and does not need a remote (central) repository to get started. However, if you'd like to use some public Git repo servers for your hands-on, you could use either GitHub or repo.or.cz.

Follow the below link for setting up an account in Github. This is a screencast provided by learningrails website.

As a summary, Git is a great version control system among other systems out there. Which comes with lots and lots of documentation, online tutorials and FREE public Git repositories. All of these could help developers a hassle-free transition towards using Git.